Valve doesn’t have to give their shelf space away for free. Valve doesn’t have to deal with people who do not treat making games for Steam seriously.
It may be possible that you and your studio collaborators cannot possibly save up $1,000 in a year, but the question is how you and your collaborators got the computers that you use to make the game? Not to mention the thousands of hours that even the smallest, decent, game takes to make. Minimum wage in South Africal is $1.50. That gives you 667 hours of work for $1,000 – not even a full game. (Minimum wage in the US is $7.25 and in San Francisco it’s $15. Adjust as appropriate.)
If you somehow expect to make less than minimum wage while making your game, again, you’re not running it like a business, and thus a business like Valve doesn’t need to optimize for you. There are other outlets for non-profits.
Anyway, compare to grocery stores. Most large grocery chains will want you to pay a “slotting fee” for them to even consider allocating some shelf space for you. Doesn’t matter how delicious your Curry Sauce is; without a $50,000 slotting fee, you don’t go on the shelves of Safeway. (Repeat for Luckies, Ralphs, HEB, and all the other supermarket chains you care about.) , once you pay to allocate shelf space, they expect you to actually go into their stores and put the items on the shelves. They don’t even do that work for you. (And they don’t keep inventory other than on the shelves, either.)
Like it or not, business runs the world, and business runs on money, and if you’re not confident that your work will make its money back, business is not for you.
Now, the argument is “quality control will solve the problem.” While it’s true that quality control could solve the problem, it has two problems in itself:
- If you believe that the market will enjoy (and pay for) a different experience than what the quality reviewers currently prefer, you may be denied even though your game might do well.
- Someone has to pay for the quality review. And, the lower the cost is to get into quality review, the more junk the reviewers have to play through, which drives up the overall cost of review.
If you believe that quality review is the way to go, I recommend you to go to a traditional publisher – they do exactly that; review game concepts and teams, and figure out which games they invest in and bring to market.